


what we talk about when we talk about whalers

by patho (ghostsoldier)



Series: what we talk about when we talk about whalers [5]
Category: Dishonored (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Headcanon, Low Chaos, Not!Fic, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-12-21
Updated: 2013-12-16
Packaged: 2017-11-21 20:35:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 16
Words: 17,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/601800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghostsoldier/pseuds/patho
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Over on <a href="http://pathopharmacology.tumblr.com">my tumblr</a>, a lot of folks have asked about my headcanons regarding the Whalers, particularly a group of five or so that I write about on a regular basis. I like answering headcanon questions with short stories, so this is an ongoing compilation of the resulting ficlets. </p><p>There's no real order to these, but they all take place during a Low Chaos run of the game.</p><p>Apologies to Raymond Carver for the title.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. on jenkins

**Author's Note:**

> **[orbitoflove](http://orbitoflove.tumblr.com/) asked: Jenkins! Or any of the other Whalers because omfg too adorables**

_Then:_  
  
He decides not to tell anyone his first name, and he’s not sure whether it bothers him or not that no one asks. Not even Daud.  
  
Not that he expected Daud to ask. He doesn’t really expect Daud to ask him anything other than, “Are you sure you can handle this?” and “Did you get the job done?” and he’s relieved that the answer to both questions is a definite, “Yes.”  
  
It’s not that he doesn’t like his first name. It’s…okay, he supposes. Larabie. A solid name, his granddad’s, maybe a little old-fashioned but Jenkins kind of likes that. His granddad was Morley soldier who fathered seven kids after getting his leg and one of his testicles blown off in the war. If you’re going to be named after an old relative, that’s definitely the one you want.  
  
But Larabie is what his mother called him. His father. His older sisters, and his baby brother, and he doesn’t HAVE a mother or a father or sisters or a brother anymore, so no, Jenkins doesn’t want to be Larabie anymore, he doesn’t want to be Larabie at all.  
  
There wasn’t much left, after the fire. He found a little iron locket, one that belonged to his mother, and his brother Milo’s glasses. The rest was ash, or unsalvageable.  
  
And it’s better, being Jenkins. Larabie was a soft, stupid kid. Larabie would’ve balked at killing, and Jenkins…doesn’t. Not anymore. Not after Daud yelled at them for twenty minutes about the appropriate use of sleeping poison. Larabie was scared of pain but Jenkins just grits his teeth through the worst of the tattoos, and Larabie’s dreams were haunted by fire and Jenkins…  
  
Jenkins doesn’t dream. Not anymore.  
  
No one asks his name, and he tells himself he’s relieved.

_*_

_Now:_  
  
He’s on the roof when Eli finds him. The kid’s still getting used to his powers and he overshoots a lot, and even though it’s been years Jenkins still remembers what that was like. How terrifying it was when it was new, and how exhilarating. He grins in spite of himself, and offers the kid his flask.  
  
“I just got Smith’s story,” Eli says, after he takes a sip and hands the flask back. “So that just leaves you.”  
  
Jenkins tilts his head back. Cloudy night. Muddy stars. “Heh,” he says. “Good luck with that.”  
  
Eli flops down next to him. “Not even your first name?”  
  
And Jenkins blinks, because that’s not…that’s not a thing anyone asks. Not anymore. And he’s not planning to answer, but he remembers how lost Eli looked when they found him in that Rudshore apartment, the way Eli thanked him, later, for making him take a few mementos along, and so instead of a quip he just leans back on his hands and says, “Larabie,” and the name feels rusty and strange in his mouth.  
  
“Huh,” Eli says after a moment. “You know, it suits you.”  
  
“If you tell anyone,” Jenkins says, “I’ll cut your throat. I mean it.”  
  
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Eli says, clearly not taking him seriously in the least, and they lean against each other and watch the clouds until it gets too cold to stay outside.


	2. on cooking

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **[ladysmaragdina](http://ladysmaragdina.tumblr.com/) asked: Random question! What are all the Whalers' favorite things to cook, and what are the results?**

Smith likes baking bread, although he doesn’t get to do it very much. Growing wild yeasts isn’t a problem but finding good flour is, and on the few occasions one of the other Whalers manages to bring some back Smith’s usually the one who lays claim to it. Which…no one objects to, because Smith can actually cook, and warm fresh bread is one of the few luxuries they can all agree on.

There’s something so tactile about bread. The smell of the yeast, the way the dough goes from sticky to silk beneath the heels of his palms. Bread dough is alive in a way Smith finds deeply comforting, and after everything is over and he and the others follow Daud to warmer, drier climes, he bakes bread every day. He fills the counter with row after row of steaming loaves, and there’s always flour in his hair and on his clothes.

—

Tyros is fond of traditional Serkonan fare, which Daud appreciates and next to no one else does. Daud won’t admit to appreciating it, of course, but Tyros doesn’t care. It’s not Daud he’s making it for.

Blood sausage and stuffed grape leaves, little pastries filled with chopped garlic and oily little fish that he’d fried until crisp. Sea salt, hot tiny peppers that set the tongue on fire. Tyros is the best cook of them all but he doesn’t take requests, and if the others don’t know what to do with herbed oils and pungent spices and bright, fresh greens, well…that’s all the more for him. Tyros prefers food that tastes of home.

—

Reynolds doesn’t like to cook. Cooking is what they have people like Eli for, and Tyros when he’s willing to lay off the damn spice once in a while, and Reynolds doesn’t see why he should be made to pitch in when he’d be perfectly happy to dump a tin of potted whale meat into a skillet and call it a day.

Which he has, quite often, because unlike the rest of these assholes he’s not PICKY. Food’s food. A slice of bread and a warmed up tin, that’s all Reynolds needs to be happy.

He doesn’t get picked for kitchen duty very much.

—

Eli’s big on comfort food. He’s a Dunwall boy through and through, and when he gets tagged for meal duty he tends to fall back on childhood favorites. Melted cheese on toast, meat pies with big chunks of carrot and potato, fried fish with crisp onion and slices of lemon. Like most of the Whalers, he’s incredibly relieved when they finally leave Gristol, mostly because it means they can make and eat food that doesn’t come out of a can. He still leans towards Gristol styles of cooking, but the longer they’re in Serkonos the more he branches out. He and Tyros are usually the ones to go on market runs, and he’s incredibly proud of himself when he learns how to make Serkonan blood sausage for the first time.

—

Jenkins is not allowed in the kitchen.

Not after the incident with the jellied eels.

Especially not after the incident with the cake.

No exceptions.


	3. on the heart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Anonymous asked: How does the character or characters of your choice react when Corvo pulls out a still beating heart and points it at them?**

Jenkins has seen a lot of weird shit since he joined up with Daud years ago, but this definitely takes the cake.

At first, he’s not sure if he’s seeing it correctly. Sleeping poison fucks with your head a bit, which is why Daud made them test it out on each other before they ever used it on anyone else. It was important to know how the target was affected, he’d said. The dizziness, the way the world tilts on its side, the half-hallucinatory grogginess. So Jenkins knows from experience that what he’s seeing might not be real, and honestly, what makes more sense? That his brain is just really confused right now, or that Corvo-the-escaped-prisoner-and-wow-are-they-ever-in-trouble-for-that-one is holding a human heart in his hands, and the heart is _still beating_.

Jenkins may not be able to figure out how to work his legs right now, but he knows which answer he’s going with.

He still goes for his crossbow, because even though he suspects Daud was practically daring Corvo to escape, rules are rules and they _cannot_ let this guy get to their boss, but his fingers feel numb and stiff and the crossbow clatters to the floor before he can even load the bolt. Corvo half-turns at the noise, and the heart in his hands is all but glowing and…shit, what did Corvo put _in_ this stuff? This is way stronger than anything the Whalers have ever used.

And then he hears it. A murmur at the edges of his hearing, very faint, drifting in and out of his awareness like the hum of whalebone or the distant song of the runes.

_There is something about this one_ , says the voice. _A memory. From before?_  
  
Corvo cocks his head, and even with the mask there’s something faintly curious about the gesture. Almost like he…heard it too. And then he extends his arm, pointing the thing at Jenkins and it’s _still beating what the actual fuck this isn’t happening_ , and he hears it again, terribly faint and a little confused, a woman’s voice whispering about fog and secrets and death.  
  
Jenkins doesn’t think he’s ever been so relieved to pass out in his _life_.


	4. on tyros

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **[mugumugu](http://mugumugu.tumblr.com/) asked: if you don't mind me spamming with all the questions - how does Tyros feel about going to Serkonos for the vineyard thing?**

Tyros grew up on the eastern end of the island, in a village between Karnaca and Cullero. They primarily grew olives there, and figs, and as a boy Tyros learned how temperamental soil could be, what insects were good and which ones weren’t. He grew up with sun on his shoulders and dirt under his fingernails, and although it was a good life it was also a poor one, and like so many Serkonan boys before him he was seduced by the call of the sea and the promise of gold. This, in a roundabout way, is what led him to Daud.

Being a Whaler is far preferable to being a pirate. The pay is better and much to his surprise he has to kill far fewer people, and the powers are a definite perk. When he was a boy the teachings of the Abbey hadn’t rooted well in his village, and at sea he’d gotten to learn the moods and vagaries of the Outsider well, as all men of the ocean did. The freedoms he’s traded are well worth it. When the younger Whalers complain about their tiny beds or scratchy blankets, Tyros always grins and tells them they should thank the Outsider that it’s not a worn rope hammock, and that the floor is standing still.

He likes being a Whaler, and he likes Daud — more or less — but what he doesn’t like is Gristol. It’s a sad, strange land, all rain-slick stone and muddy rivers, the wet reek of salt always hanging in the air. The people are strange and uneasy and he hates the food, and so when Daud announces that he’s disbanding them so he can return to his homeland after eighteen long years, Tyros is the first to say he’ll join him.

The reaction this gets is exactly what he expected. Daud blinks, looking confused. “No,” he says. “I’m going alone.”

“Because you have a monopoly on returning to Serkonos?” The other Whalers are watching this exchange with no small amount of interest. They’re all still afraid of Daud, but things have been different. After the Empress. After Corvo. Tyros inclines his head, and says, “You are not the only one who misses his home.”

“No,” Daud says again, “absolutely not,” but in the end it doesn’t amount to much because once Tyros decided to go the others wanted to as well, and really, what does Dunwall hold for any of them? Not even the men who call it home hold any real love for it, and what use are they if they don’t have a leader? He’ll forgive Daud for trying to set them adrift; sometimes, Tyros suspects Daud doesn’t quite know what he’d built when he picked these broken men out of the mud and reshaped them to his needs. To cut them loose would not have been a kindness, and thankfully it’s a moot point anyhow.

So Daud goes to Serkonos, and they all follow, and Tyros remembers once again what it was like to have sun on his shoulders and dirt under his fingernails. He relearns the whims of the soil and the cycles of the insects. He argues with Daud about grapes, and he plants a fig tree.

It is a good life.


	5. on reynolds

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **[mugumugu](http://mugumugu.tumblr.com/) asked: Is Reynolds usually grumpy all the time? (bonus: what does he think about monkeys in fezes?)**

Kord Reynolds isn’t grumpy.

He’s realistic.

There’s a damn difference.

You learn what it is to be realistic when you grow up as a guttersnipe in Caulkenny. He’s heard it said that artists and philosophers come from all walks of life in Morley, that the weather turns the mind inward, that the Empire’s boot on your neck leads one to flourish in other ways. Maybe it’s true and maybe it isn’t. Reynolds may know shit about art or philosophy, but he knows plenty about trying to rise above. He learned the way of the world from dockhands and pickpockets, cut his first throat before he was thirteen, scrounged pennies for good shoes and lied his way onto the first ship that would take him. He knows about boots on your neck, about what it means to choose between _too cold_ or _too hungry_.

The others think it’s made him hard. He just thinks it’s made him practical.

For example: a hard man would’ve insisted that Smith shoot the damn dogs. A hard man would’ve left Eli to rot in that apartment. A hard man would’ve let Franklin suffer instead of putting a bullet in his head once Daud was gone.

Reynolds isn’t hard, and Reynolds isn’t grumpy.

He’s realistic.

There’s a difference.

And maybe he doesn’t make stupid flipbooks like the others or knit ugly fucking mittens that no one in their right mind would wear, but he does have a sense of humor. That time he glued Jenkins’s boots to the floorboards was damn hilarious and he defies anyone to argue otherwise.

As for the monkeys…

That shit’s just not natural. He ever sees a monkey in a fez, he’s shooting the damn thing on sight.


	6. on injuries

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **[mugumugu](http://mugumugu.tumblr.com/) asked: also oh god I am so sorry with all the questions I am just so curious: who usually takes charge of the medical matters, if a serious injury happens?**

_Some time ago:_

He should’ve been in bed hours ago. But the boy had to beggar off early and one of the hounds is sick, and Vin forgot how much longer it takes to muck out the kennels when you’re doing it your own self. By the time he gets back upstairs, he’s grimier than he’d like and he hasn’t even had a chance to look over the accounts for the week. The Overseers are generally prompt on payment but the Hound Pits aren’t, and Vin wants to make sure all his numbers match up before the Bottle Street Boys or the Hatters come calling round for their slice.

Vin’s just finished wiping his hands and face off with a wet rag when someone pounds on the front door. He winces. They keep that racket up, it’ll rile the hounds something fierce and then they’ll just add to the noise. No one wants that.

“We’re closed,” he calls, hurrying to the door. “We’re closed, we’re closed, come back tomorrow,” and then he stumbles back in horrified astonishment when his mystery guests get frustrated with knocking and opt to just kick in the door instead.

“Hey now,” he snaps. ‘You can’t be doing that. You’re going to have to pay for—”

The tallest of the men points a gun three inches from his face. “Shut the fuck up.”

Vin shuts up.

There’s three of them, he realizes, although one of them is leaning heavily on the shortest and all three stink of blood and gunpowder and fear. They’re dressed like the whalers he’s seen down by the shipyards, but if these men are actual shiphands then Vin’ll eat his shoe. Those masks…

Abruptly, Vin remembers the rumors he’s heard. Yet another gang stalking the streets of Dunwall, only these men were stranger. More dangerous. They didn’t fight over territory the way the other gangs did, and they didn’t lay claim to any particular aspect of business. They were merely…there, operating on some unknown and unseen agenda, and every once in a while buildings burned or people turned up dead and always the name Daud was behind it. Daud, and his cult of masked assassins.

The room suddenly feels much too small.

“Our friend is hurt,” says the man with the gun. He’s got a voice like gravel, rough with impatience and something else. Fear, maybe. He jerks his head at the third member of their party, the one slumped against the short one, and now that he’s looking more closely Vin can see the ugly wound on his shoulder, dark blood and mangled flesh barely visible beneath the leather. He winces in unwelcome sympathy.

“That’s a right nasty wound, make no mistake,” he says. “You best be getting him to a doctor unless you want him up and dying.”

“No doctors,” says the man. “You fix him.”

Vin stares at him dumbly. “Are you daft? This here’s a kennel, not an infirmary. I do dogs. I don’t do people.”

“You’ll fix him,” the man says, and now the gun is digging into Vin’s forehead, terrifyingly real in a way the rest of this mad encounter isn’t, “or I’ll put a bullet in your head right now. How’s that for incentive?”

“Reynolds,” says the shorter man. Foreign accent, a note of warning in his voice. “He can’t very well help us if you shoot him.” He drags their friend farther into the room and lays him gently on the floor, swivels his head to look up at Vin. “We have money. You will be well compensated for your efforts.”

“You don’t understand,” Vin says, despairing, because there’s no way this is going to end well, no matter what he does he’s a dead man and he really, truly doesn’t want to be. “I don’t know how to do people. I didn’t get that kind of education, I just…I just do hounds, and they hardly ever—”

He snags a little oil lamp off the table and crouches down for a closer look. Their friend was shot by the look of it, and a nasty job of it too. What skin he can see beneath the blood is already angry and red, and there’s a little glint of metal deep in the wound that suggests the bullet is still in there. The bleeding’s not too bad — in the time it took them to get him here it’s slowed to sluggish and will probably stop on its own eventually — but even if they get the bullet out it’s already got the look of something that will fester.

But if they don’t get the bullet out, it will fester for sure. He doesn’t know where these men have been, but their leathers smell like death; wounds like this, there’s going to be bits of cloth and things stuck in there alongside the bullet. Their friend’s got an unpleasant time and a bad end ahead, no mistake.

“Even if I did work with people,” Vin says, “this is just right nasty. I don’t even know that a real doctor could fix him up proper. He’ll die of infection.”

The man on the floor groans and tries to twist away, and his companion places his hands on either side of his mask and holds his head still, murmuring things like, “hush” and “quiet now, you’ll be okay.” To Vin, he says, “Will you try, anyway?”

Vin gulps, nauseated with fear and the sick knowledge that this is probably all futile anyway. Will they come back, when their friend dies? Put a bullet between his eyes to compensate for a life he had no business trying to save?

The one with the gun, the one called Reynolds, shoves the gun away and grinds out, “Please.”

It’s the ‘please’ that does it. Vin sighs. “Okay.”

*

They help him drag their wounded friend down to the kennels, which is where all of his supplies are. The short one — he’s got a strange name, that one, Tyros or something — guiltily tries to fix the ruined front door and gives up when Vin snaps at him to bring down a bowl of water and an armful of rags. He instructs Reynolds to get the man’s clothes off, top half only and be careful of the shoulder, and when Tyros gets back with the water and the rags, Vin sends him off again for spirits while he gathers the rest of his supplies.

To his utter horror, the man being slowly revealed on the table is little more than a kid. Skinny in the way of a pup not yet grown into himself, patchy hair on his face like he’s tried and failed to grow a proper beard. He’s covered in blood and strange blue tattoos, but beneath all that his skin is clammy pale and the eyes that crack open to track his movements are glassy with pain and fear.

“Who the fuck’re you?” the kid croaks.

“A doctor,” Reynolds says, before Vin can answer, and to Vin’s surprise he smooths some of the kid’s sweaty hair out of his eyes. “He’s gonna get you all fixed up, so don’t you fucking die on us, all right? Daud’ll kill us.”

The kid utters a strangled sound of horror and tries to push himself off the table only to fall back with a thump and a hoarse cry of pain. The movement’s got him bleeding again, and Vin wordlessly wets a rag and starts getting him cleaned off.

“Fuck,” the kid gasps. “Fuck, he’s going to be so mad, you should just let me die.”

“Absolutely not,” Tyros says, coming down the steps. He’s got several bottles with him, mostly rotgut, the kind of stuff that Vin hardly drinks because it’s so strong he’s afraid he’ll go blind. “The job was completed according to his specifications. If he’s angry you were injured, perhaps he can carry out the task himself next time.”

It’s good that the conversation is keeping the kid distracted, because it’s allowing Vin a little more leeway to inspect the bullet wound. The flesh around the hole doesn’t look good, already puffy and red, and when he gently presses to feel the edges of the inflammation the kid arches off the table with a high, startled wail of agony and…shit. This is going to be bad.

“I need to get the bullet out,” Vin says. “I’ll keep everything as neat and clean as I possibly can, but if you’re praying men then I suggest you start now.”

The kid gulps. He’s shivering in a way Vin knows well, a muted shudder of nerves and pain that, were he a hound, would have him either licking Vin’s hands with his ears back and a whine in his throat, or trying to bite off his face. He’s drenched in sweat, big beads of it standing out in sharp relief over the weird swirl of his tattoos, and his eyes are huge and horribly aware. He looks, Vin thinks, much too young.

“What’s your name, son?” he says.

The kid blinks rapidly, pulse fluttering in his throat, and he rasps, “Jenkins.”

Vin puts a hand on the kid’s good shoulder. Muscles twitch nervously under his palm. By the Void, he thinks. This kid’s so fucking young.

“This is going to hurt, Jenkins,” he says gently. “It’s going to hurt a lot. I can get you something to bite on, if you like.”

“I don’t need it,” the kid says, hoarse with stupid bravado, and Vin starts to argue when Tyros strips off one of his leather gloves and hands it over, just like that.

“There is no shame in being afraid, little brother.” His voice is quiet. “Or in being hurt.”

“And seeing as you just got shot,” Reynolds says, “you might as well give up on trying to impress us.”

The kid laughs, shakily, and accepts the glove. He says, “Ready when you are, I guess,” and Vin gets to work.

*

Vin thinks he’s going to have nightmares about the sounds the kid made.

Jenkins passes out about halfway through the operation, which is a relief. Tyros had been assisting Vin, but Reynolds had to hold the kid down; with an extra set of hands and less resistance from the patient, things move a lot more quickly.

The air is sharp with the smell of blood and rotgut, and it’s going to take him days to get the blood out from under his fingernails, but eventually he gets the bullet out and cleans the wound as best he can. There’d been a big vessel that gave him some panic — plugged by the bullet, it started bleeding like a mad thing once the little chunk of metal was free. Thank goodness he’d thought to bring the artery forceps, because otherwise there would’ve been no ligating the damn thing. He’d stitched the layers of muscle and skin the same he did with the dogs, and after that it was just one last good cleaning and some plaster. Bandages. A sling.

The other men are quiet. They’d stripped out of their masks and gloves when it became apparent that Vin needed help, and although they’re both younger than he’d expected neither of them are quite so stupidly youthful as the Jenkins kid. They’re as tattooed as he is — a gang thing, Vin suspects, like the ridiculous getups the Hatters wear — and he can’t help but feel a little touched by the honest concern in their faces. This kid’s one of theirs and they care about him, and in spite of his genuine conviction that the kid will probably die he finds himself wanting to reassure them anyway. Warns them about infection, instructs them on how to properly clean the wound until it’s healed. Gives them a packet of the herbs he normally uses for poultices and advises them on how to make it into a tisane instead.

Reynolds eyes the herbs suspiciously. “This is for dogs,” he says.

Vin throws up his hands. “Because I’m a _kennelmaster_ ,” he snaps. “If you don’t want it, you don’t have to take it.”

Tyros plucks the packet out of Reynolds’s hands and secretes it away somewhere on his person. “Thank you,” he tells Vin. “We appreciate your help. And I apologize for not helping to stay and clean, but there are members of the Watch who may be looking for us soon and it’s perhaps best we were on our way.”

“Sure,” Vin says. He turns away for a moment to rummage through his supplies, because he’s probably got an extra blanket or something they could wrap around the kid to get him home, and when he does there’s a strange, soft sound, like a gasp or rush of air, and when he turns back he’s all alone in the little basement room.

On the table, sitting in a spot that’s marginally less tacky with blood than the rest, is a small, brown leather bag. It’s heavy when he lifts it, and there’s no mistaking the clink of shifting coin within.

There’s more than enough in the bag to pay for the door. In fact, there’s more than enough to pay his rent.

For the next two months.

Vin looks the pile of blood-soaked rags, the empty bottles, the misshapen bullet still sitting in a sticky pool of red, and he laughs and laughs and _laughs_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I like to think that over the next several years Vin patches up most of the Whalers in some form or another. He never becomes one of them and he never asks too many questions about what they do, but every other gang in the city leaves him alone and they always pay him well. He was incredibly relieved to find out that Jenkins survived. Jenkins, in true Jenkins form, asked if Vin had kept the bullet — he wanted to make it into a good luck charm, or something equally ridiculous — and was deeply disappointed when Vin admitted to just throwing it away.


	7. on smith

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **[rickyisnotagirlsname](http://rickyisnotagirlsname.tumblr.com/) asked: You said you were willing to answer more, so, if you don't mind? How does Smith handle his first few days as a Whaler?**
> 
> (Smith is the ex-Overseer turned Whaler from ['the wandering and the lost'](http://archiveofourown.org/works/579438))

That first week, he doesn’t know what to do with himself. His heretical new powers are both terrifying and nauseating, but they’re also exhilarating in a way he doesn’t like examining too closely. Tethering he picks up on quickly; transversal is more difficult. Whenever he tries to hold the shape of a place in his mind, other images elbow in and they’re usually…

They’re usually memories, and they aren’t pleasant ones.

He spends a lot of time in those first few days lurching crazily through the air in one direction or another and then being noisily sick, and while the others feel bad for him it’s not as though there’s much they can do. He’s either going to catch on or he isn’t, and although no one says as much he suspects that not catching on will lead to his dead body ending up in a ditch.

It’s not as upsetting a thought as it might seem.

He doesn’t see much of his new leader, a man the others call Daud. This, he gathers, isn’t unusual. Daud seems to keep a small crew close and it’s these men who disseminate orders to the others. Take charge of training. Organize schedules. The one time he does meet with Daud, the man looks him up and down, as if trying to recall exactly where they’d met.

“Smith, right?” His smile is as quick and sharp as a blade in the dark. “The Overseer.”

 _Not an Overseer anymore_ , Smith thinks. Aloud, he says, “Yes, sir.”

Daud cocks his head, regarding him with hooded eyes. Absurdly, the gesture reminds Smith of the Abbey hounds and once the comparison is in his mind he can’t seem to stop circling around it. It’s the solidity of him, the sense of raw, barely-concealed violence lurking beneath his sleek exterior. Daud is a man who knows the taste of blood.

“It’s usually the first few kills that give new initiates pause,” Daud says casually. “But you don’t have that problem, do you?”

Eye contact is a challenge to hounds. Smith drops his gaze to the floorboards.

It had been easy. He doesn’t need to know their names, why they were marked for death, whether they were good men or bad. Whether they had families. The men and women in the Abbey interrogation chamber, they always had families. And they always begged. Cried. Said, “please no please please we’ll tell you whatever you want _please_ …” and then they’d turned on their friends, their neighbors, their own parents.

Anything to get them out of that room alive.

Smith doesn’t like thinking about how most of them ended up.

The man he was told to kill for Daud did not beg. He didn’t scream, or cry. He didn’t betray the people he loved. He merely uttered a small, surprised gasp and clapped his hands to the wound Smith had opened in his throat, and Smith had gently eased him to the ground and pulled his hands away, had held him until his last breath left him and he died.

And that had been that.

He says, “No.”

Daud makes a thoughtful noise. “I thought you might like to know the ship arrived in Tyvia yesterday afternoon.”

Smith says, “Sir?”

“All twelve of your little foundlings are safe,” Daud says. “They’ll have new homes, the Abbey will never touch them, and no one will be the wiser.” He jerks his head towards the door. “Now get out. And don’t let me hear about you missing any more transversals. A man as comfortable with a knife as you is far too valuable for me to kill.”

Smith leaves. He feels like he’s shaking but when he looks at his hands they’re steady, steady as when he’d killed his Abbey brothers on the road to Whitecliff, steady as when he’d held a dying man chosen for him from a list.

He closes his eyes, and holds an image in his head. There is a strange rushing sound in his mind, and when he opens his eyes again he’s outside.

His stomach rolls, once, and then settles.

One of the other men looks up at him, seemingly unsurprised that Smith just appeared next to him from nowhere. He says, “You all right there, Smith?”

“Yes,” Smith says. Exhales, and his hands are so very steady. “I’m fine.”


	8. on the old guard

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **[child-of-drought](http://child-of-drought.tumblr.com/) asked: Who was the first Whaler?**
> 
> Warnings: offscreen death of an OC

They don’t hold funerals.

There usually isn’t a body to bury.

With the work they do, it’s not unusual to be separated from each other for several days. A week, at times. Usually they’re sent out in teams, but some missions require the kind of stealth and light touch that only a single person can accomplish and at first no one thinks anything of it when Sanderson doesn’t come back. There are procedures, after all. A system, carefully developed over the many years they’ve been in Dunwall. When the time for the first check-in has come and gone and there’s still nothing from Sanderson at the appointed dead drop, Rulfio puts them on low-level alert.

Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s not. Either way, they’re to patrol in pairs until it’s been sorted out, and he takes two men with him to the Estate District, where Sanderson had been last assigned.

When they get back, Rulfio goes straight to Daud’s office and closes the door behind him. The other two men hang back in the hallway, shoulders hunched. No one asks them what they found.

No one needs to ask.

It’s not that Sanderson was particularly well-liked. Unlike Rulfio, he barely tolerated the new initiates and quickly grew frustrated with their lapses. Most of the younger man are convinced he was the one who ratted them out to Daud about their attempts to avoid collateral casualties; he sometimes seemed to take a little too much joy in their work.

But, like Rulfio, he had been there from the beginning. Led teams, mercilessly drilled them into perfection, saved everyone’s ass at least once over the years. The quiet conversation behind the closed door of Daud’s office is upsetting, and leaves many of them struggling with a bewildering stab of grief. They may not have liked Sanderson, but he was still one of _theirs_.

One of the oldest. The toughest. The most capable. They stand in the hallway and try not to eavesdrop, contemplate the little pins hidden in the trick flap of their gloves. Wondering.

If called upon, could they…?

(And on the heels of this thought comes the bone-deep certainty that they _would_ , but this is cold comfort in the face of hushed discussion and an empty dead drop. The knowledge that Sanderson will not be given the dignity of a good death, that none of them will be should the time come. They all know about the rats. The hagfish. The dogs. Bodies wrapped in ragged sheets and dumped like firewood on the banks of the river. Men like them cannot expect to die well.)

When Rulfio leaves Daud’s office, none of them try to pretend they were doing anything other than eavesdrop and for once, he doesn’t call them on it. His mask is under his arm and his face is grim, weary lines set deep in the corners of his eyes and at the edges of his mouth. He looks sad, and tired.

“Someone bring me his footlocker,” he says.

One of them blinks away and is back in the next moment, a battered metal box cradled carefully in his arms. Rulfio trades his gas mask for the box, and they all follow him outside, carefully navigating the ramps until they are in a spot overlooking the deepest section of murky water.

Rulfio opens the box.

“His name was Gavin Sanderson,” he says. “When we met I was a young man and he held a gun to the back of my head, and for whatever reason he changed his mind. I owe him my life, many times over.”

As he speaks, he draws items from the box. Little things, foolish things, the kinds of things they all keep tucked away in their own footlockers and don’t talk about. Scraps of their pasts. Memories that keep them human. A book. A child’s toy. A packet of yellowing letters wrapped in a frayed, discolored ribbon. Ruflio passes them to the man next to him and this man passes them on, and when they return to him Ruflio holds each item in his cupped hands a moment longer before tossing it into the muddy green water below.

“Gavin Sanderson is dead,” he says. “May his soul sleep restfully in dark waters.”

They bring the footlocker back inside, place it at the end of a now-empty bunk. Someday there will be a new recruit, and he will take Sanderson’s bed and Sanderson’s box and never be the wiser. It’s bad luck, to speak aloud of the dead.

But each time one of them passes that particular section of water, he holds in his head the names of the men whose histories have been swallowed by the murky green. In doing so, he remembers.

They don’t hold funerals.

They have other ways of honoring their dead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m pretty sure the “Corvo’s Bounty” note to Daud was written by a Whaler. He talks about how “we” have Corvo alive, and how they were watching Slackjaw and preparing to make a move when he disappeared. What fascinates me about the letter is that it’s a lot of informal strategy discussion. The part about Slackjaw makes me think that Daud assigns certain tasks or missions to teams, and then he expects them to report back as things progress. I also find it interesting that Rulfio (BEST NAME EVER) discusses the issue of Corvo’s bounty with Daud. It suggests that whatever hierarchy exists among the Whalers, he’s closer to the top of it than, say, the guys in the boat who brought Corvo in, or the ones who discuss Corvo’s resourcefulness at the Greaves Oil Refinery


	9. on interrogation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **[turquoisedesertsand](http://turquoisedesertsand.tumblr.com/) asked: Any thoughts about the Whaler that killed himself while in Overseer custody?**
> 
> Warnings: torture, character death (OC), suicide

It’s something they learn right around the time of initiation. What happens, if you’re taken. When you should expect rescue. If you should expect rescue. When to know that no one will come.

What’s expected of you, should that occur.

In that first week, they learn about the trick flaps in their gloves and the pin that fits so neatly inside. They practice, over and over, with pins that are razor-sharp and free from poison. They practice until their hands are bleeding from dozens of tiny wounds, and their instructors watch with impassive stances and say, “Again.” They practice, until they get it right: a careful and precise movement meant to jab the needle deep into the meat of the palm. It’s a calculated gesture. Not easy to do accidentally.

Before they coat their pins with poison for the first time, they are instructed to test it out on another living creature. Rats, usually. They are instructed to test it, and they are instructed to _watch_ , and the more senior Whalers take bets on whose nerves will get the better of them. Who will look away. Who will throw up. It’s cruel, perhaps, but in a year’s time the Whaler retching miserably in the corner while his rat writhes on the floor will be taking bets on the new set of recruits. It’s how they cope.

After all, they each have their own needles, hidden carefully in their own gloves. They all have to live with the knowledge that each and every one of them could be next.

He hadn’t thrown up when he’d poisoned his rat.

He feels like throwing up now.

He’d been careless. It was as simple and stupid as that. Careless. A slip-up. All he’d wanted was a closer look at the device, and he’d gotten it, and then — the memory goes jumbled there. He remembers a terrible grinding noise, a sound that made him feel weak and shivery and helpless, like his stomach was being pulled out through his ears, and his powers weren’t working and he couldn’t _get out_ and the sound was like _dying_ , and then they’d…he—

The base of his skull aches like a rotten tooth. The butt of a pistol, perhaps. It’s muddled. Every time he moves his head, bright nauseating pain flares white behind his eyes and there’s an old children’s song circling in crazed loops through his mind—

_—should overseers come to call know your strictures one and all should overseers come to call know your strictures one and all should overseers—_

—and he is afraid.

He doesn’t want to die.

The room is big, and cold. He can hear voices and they’re harsh, mocking, but there is a murkiness to the words like they’re coming from underwater and he can’t make out what they’re saying. He is strapped into a chair, and the chair is digging into his spine. The base of his neck. The backs of his knees. Like they designed it wrong on purpose, so that merely sitting in it is an act of agony.

And he doesn’t want to die, _he doesn’t want to die_ , but he knows that he will not be leaving this room alive and it’s preferable, he thinks, for it to be at his own hands. His own choice. Better that than the long, agonizing death _they_ would give him, because he knows what happens in these rooms. They all know what happens in these rooms.

They question you, first.

Then they cleanse you.

And then, if you’re very lucky, they let you die.

Only fire awaits the unlucky ones. That is not the death he wants.

In several days, the others will know he’s not coming back. They’ll bring his footlocker outside, and they’ll hold the last remaining pieces of him in their hands. They will remember him, the way they’ve remembered others.

Sanderson.

Faraday.

Kadir.

Richards.

Luwellyn.

There are more names, but he can’t think of them.

And this is what he holds onto, in his mind. Not the rat he’d watched die, not what will happen to his body, not the image of his own empty bed and a newly clean footlocker. He thinks about his brothers saying his name and giving him to the waters, and he closes his eyes and he steels himself for the sharp little jab of pain and he twists his wrist—

_And he can’t move his arms_.

For a moment, the despair that crashes over him is so all-encompassing that he can’t breathe. Panic blooms icy in his chest and stomach, and he stares in disbelief at the straps firmly binding his arms and wrists to the chair. They’ve strapped him down. They’ve strapped him down, and now he can’t move.

_No_ , he thinks. Helplessly. Made small by fear and grief and _rage_ , that he won’t even be allowed to die the way he fucking chooses. _No,_ he thinks, _please_.

They pull off his mask. Strip open his leathers and his clothes. They comment on his tattoos, and they _laugh_ , and when they’re peeling off his gloves he sees his chance and it turns out to be easy, so much easier than he’d thought it would be, easy to move his hand just a little and at just the right moment. The needle bites deep, and he has never been more thankful to see himself bleed.

It’s not going to take long.

He remembers that much, with the rat. It’s not going to take long at all.

It starts in his hands. His feet. Traveling up the length of him, muscles drawing tight and shaking and it _hurts_ , Outsider protect him, it hurts like he never could’ve imagined it hurting, the straps digging into his arms as he shakes, bright agonized flare of pain in his head as the knot at the back of his skull hits the metal behind him—

And they are asking about Daud but he wouldn’t answer even if he could or maybe it’s the other way around, he couldn’t answer even if he wanted to and he doesn’t he doesn’t he doesn’t want to answer and he doesn’t want to die

slap on his cheek

_won’t work_ , he thinks

_too late_ , he thinks

harder to breathe like trying to inhale broken glass and there are noises and he thinks the noises are coming from him like his body’s not his own any more and it never really was

not after he said yes to the mark

and yes to to the pin

and yes to everything

this is what you signed on for this is what you agreed to

you said yes

yes you said yes

you

you said yes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the curious — I decided that the poison they use is a cyanotoxin, which is produced by some forms of blue-green algae. What’s notable about cyanotoxins is that some of them — like anatoxin-a — cause very rapid death if ingested or injected. Anatoxin-a in particular affects the receptors involved in muscle coordination. The toxin causes the receptor to fire, which stimulates the neuron and triggers a muscle contraction, but it doesn’t allow the neuron to return to its resting state afterwards. This results in rapid onset tremors, which quickly progress to convulsions, respiratory paralysis, and death. Since the cyanobacteria that produce it are usually found in fresh or brackish water, it seemed like the kind of thing the Whalers would have easy access to in the Flooded District, and the time of onset fits with what we hear in the audiograph.


	10. on reynolds, redux

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [alucifer](http://alucifer.tumblr.com/) asked for additional Reynolds headcanons. I obliged.

1\. He’s not sure he believes in the Outsider. Like, yeah, okay, his woo-woo powers obviously come from _somewhere_ and those little bits of whalebone are really fucking creepy (what with the whispering and shit), but all that nonsense about the Outsider appearing as a beautiful young man with black eyes to grant desires you didn’t know you had? COME THE FUCK ON. That’s not the damn Outsider; that’s the fever dream of a sexually frustrated Overseer who’s been smoking the good shit from Karnaca.

(Besides, every kid in Morley knows the Outsider is a squid. “A beautiful young man” indeed. Pfft.)

2\. Before he joined up with Daud, the longest job he ever held was on a deep sea trawler that looped up north of Tyvia. He was a little over 14 at the time, and his job was to keep the deck free from ice and help the men sort through the catch when they brought the nets and the cages back up. He still has dreams sometimes about the creatures that spilled across their deck — strange fish with not enough eyes or too many, long snakelike creatures with rows upon rows of bristling teeth, bizarre monsters that lit up from within and tracked him with eerily shining eyes before they breathed their last — but these dreams aren’t unpleasant ones.

3\. He actually likes most of the guys he works with, but the way he shows affection is to act like a total dick. Unfortunately, the way he indicates that he _doesn’t_ like someone is to…act like a total dick. Eli spent his first three months as a Whaler absolutely convinced that Reynolds hated him, until Tyros pulled him aside and explained that no, actually, Reynolds was looking out for him, he just has a ridiculous way of showing it. Eli’s still not entirely convinced.

4\. The one person he’s _not_ a dick to is Smith. And if other people want to be a dick to Smith? Reynolds will shoot them in the _fucking face_.

5\. He once got into a month-long prank war with Jenkins over something really stupid. Jenkins shaved off one of Reynolds’s sideburns; Reynolds retaliated by shaving off Jenkins’s mustache. The prank war was pretty much over after that. It took ages for Jenkins’s mustache to grow back, and Jenkins didn’t talk to him for about two weeks. Everyone else thought it was hilarious.

6\. He doesn’t really like Daud. He respects him like crazy and he’s happy to call the guy his boss, but some of the stuff Daud does rubs him the wrong way. Like that shit with the Overseer in the hole — Franklin, or whatever his name had been. Killing people is one thing; torturing them is another. Reynolds killed Franklin the second he thought he could get away with it (they all knew he wasn’t going to leave alive), and he didn’t complain a bit about the punishment that followed.

7\. Reynolds is among the men that head off to Serkonos after everything is said and done, but it’s not Daud he’s following.

8\. Because the thing is, he needs to look out for these idiots. Not Tyros — Tyros doesn’t need looking after, which is simultaneously nice and really fucking annoying — but the others. Maybe they don’t know he looks out for them, but he does, and if he’d stayed in Gristol he would’ve worried about Jenkins getting himself bit by a poisonous snake in the marketplace or something equally stupid. Better to just go along and make sure.

9\. He will never admit this to any of them.

10\. They all pretty much suspect it anyway.


	11. on bedsharing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Anonymous asked: if jenkins isn't allowed a bed can't he just share reynolds'**
> 
>  
> 
> (Regarding a previous conversation in which Jenkins loses his bed privileges because he stole all of Daud's cigarettes in a prank he _really_ didn't think through all the way)

None of them are very heavy sleepers. So when the corner of the blanket lifts and the left side of his shitty excuse of a mattress dips down, Reynolds is awake with a knife to the person's throat before either of them has time to draw breath. It only takes another second or so for him to realize that it's not an attacker at all, only a sheepish-looking Jenkins, but he still doesn't lower the knife. A man's gotta have boundaries.

"The fuck're you doing?" he growls.

Jenkins grins weakly. "I was cold?" He winces when Reynolds rather pointedly presses the knife blade just a _little_ harder. "Outsider's balls, knock it off. I was cold and the hounds are all piled on Smith already and Daud took away the blanket I'd smuggled outside. Okay?"

He rubs at his neck when Reynolds finally withdraws the knife. "In retrospect, I guess I should've poked you with a stick or something to wake you up first."

Reynolds sits back down and stows the blade under his pillow again. It _is_ cold out; his bunk's quickly losing what little warmth it had and even in the murkiness of the dorm he can see the white puffs of their breathing. Jenkins is all but hunched over with cold, shivering a bit with his leathers draped around his shoulders to ward off the chill, and Reynolds might be tempted to feel bad for him if the situation wasn't his own damn fault in the first place.

"Sorry, kid," he says. Slides back under his own blankets and roughs his pillow back into shape. "You wouldn't be in this fool mess if you'd just give the man back his cigs. You wanna bunk with someone, fine, but go do it with someone else."

"But you _owe_ me," Jenkins says plaintively, and Reynolds rolls back over to stare incredulously at him because...what the fuck?

"How in the seven levels of the Void do you figure _that_?" he says.

Jenkins breathes into his cupped hands and then rubs them briskly together. He somehow looks even more embarrassed than he did a minute ago, which is no mean feat considering the usual level of exaggeration in his expressions.

"You remember how your cigarette supply mysteriously replenished itself a few days ago?" Jenkins says. Reynolds' eyes widen.

"You have got to be fucking kidding," he says, his voice flat.

Jenkins just gives him a slightly worried smile, and Reynolds groans and rolls onto his back, scrubbing his hands over his face. His cigs _had_ mysteriously increased in number a short while ago. He hadn't thought much of it -- just assumed someone'd found a stash somewhere and split it evenly among them -- but this definitely makes a horrible sort of sense. Even worse, he finds himself admiring the sheer _balls_ of the gesture. Kid didn't just steal Daud's cigarettes -- he fucking _gave_ 'em away to someone else.

And seeing as Reynolds has no intention of giving 'em back...

"Ugh, fine," he snaps, flipping back the covers. "Get your ass in here."

Jenkins looks stunned and doesn't move.

"You got sand in your ears, kid? Fucking _move_. I'm losing heat."

Jenkins twitches and quickly toes off his boots, shrugs out of his uniform uppers so that he can slide into the bed behind Reynolds. Reynolds isn't all that surprised that the kid takes up way more room than he ought; he's a short, skinny little fucker, at least compared to the rest of them, but he's always managed to take up ridiculous amounts of space. What _does_ surprise him is the way the kid plasters himself to his back. He hadn't...really expected that.

Even less expected are the fucking _ice cold_ hands that slip beneath his shirt. Reynolds sucks in a startled breath and elbows Jenkins as hard as he can in the ribs.

"Sorry," Jenkins says, muffled into his shoulder and not sounding sorry at all. "Told you I was cold."

Reynolds glowers at the far wall. He's doing his best to ignore the way the kid's shivering, but it's fucking impossible. Stupid little shit. Finally, he sighs and grabs Jenkins's hands, chafes them rapidly between his own until they stop feeling like shards of ice.

"Hey, thanks," Jenkins says. Reynolds elbows him again, just because he can.

"Don't fucking talk to me," he mutters. "We're just gonna pretend like this isn't happening."

"Okay," Jenkins says, agreeable as anything -- and of course he's fucking agreeable, he's actually getting _warm_ , and he'd probably say anything just to keep Reynolds from booting him out on his ass again -- and somehow squinches in even closer. Nose tucked against Reynolds' neck, breath hot on his skin. Reynolds is beginning to regret letting him be the big spoon. It'd made sense a few minutes ago, because he'd thought this was better than him being wrapped around the kid, but now he's not so sure.

For one thing, Jenkins' hands are slowly but surely creeping under his shirt again.

"Hands," Reynolds snaps, and Jenkins yanks back like he was burned.

"I'm sorry," he says. "It's just. You're so _warm_."

Outsider's fucking eyes.

"Don't make me stab you," Reynolds says. "You know I will."

"Right," Jenkins says. He doesn't sound all that convinced. "Okay. Hands to myself from now on, I promise."

"You better," Reynolds grumbles, and after a while Jenkins stops shivering and his breathing evens out and his death grip around Reynolds' midsection eventually eases. Reynolds didn't expect to fall asleep himself, but when he opens his eyes again there's gray, early-morning sunlight filtering in through the jagged holes in the roof and Tyros is smirking at him from the next bed over.

Reynolds quickly takes stock. Jenkins is clinging to his back like a barnacle, and at some point during the night his hands have gone right back under Reynolds' shirt. One on his chest, the other splayed over his stomach. It's stupidly comfortable.

"Sleep well?" Tyros says innocently.

Reynolds scowls. "Fuck you."

Tyros' smirk widens into a big, white, shit-eating grin. "Somehow," he says, "I sincerely doubt that it's me you want to--" and he easily ducks the knife that Reynolds yanks from beneath the pillow and throws at him. "A little touchy, are we?"

"I'll give you touchy," Reynolds says, and behind him Jenkins suddenly jolts awake with a small, startled exclamation, blurts, "Oh fuck, Daud's gonna realize I'm not outside," and flails his way out of bed, into his boots and uniform, and from the room entirely, pausing only to press his lips to Reynolds' temple and murmur, "Thanks," before he's gone.

Reynolds stares hard at the wall and doesn't move. He's pretty sure the damn kid just _kissed_ him, and he has no idea what the fuck he's supposed to do with that.

"Did he just--" Tyros says finally, and Reynolds growls, "If you like all your fingers where they are, don't you _dare_ finish that sentence."

"Ah," Tyros says, not fazed in the least. "It appears he did."

Reynolds considers throwing another knife, but decides it probably won't help. He resolves to do the next best thing: pretend it never happened and refuse to talk about it. Or think about it. Ever.

Later that day, he discovers that the cigs seem to taste better.

He doesn't think about that either.


	12. on emily

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **[turquoisedesertsand](http://turquoisedesertsand.tumblr.com) asked you: Patho. Patho, I was randomly going through my dashboard and suddenly something occurred to me. After Daud killed Jessamine it’s the Whalers who kidnapped Emily. She’s in their hands for an unknown period of time. And I suddenly started wondering, how would they have felt about that whole job, especially now that they have a terrified kid whose mother they just killed?**

They know they're not good men. Good men don't do what they do. Good men don't commit murder for money, good men don't kidnap people. Good men certainly don't kidnap _children_. They're not good men, and they've more or less made peace with this over the years. After all, most of them haven't been good men for a very long time. You get used to it, after a while.

But nothing about this job ( _and it's a job_ , they tell themselves, _it's a job and nothing more, a JOB_ ) has felt right from the start. Daud's mood began to plummet the moment he accepted it, and as the date loomed his temper shortened, began to snap when it might have otherwise stretched. The intricate planning that normally seemed to set him at ease simply made things worse this time around, and more than one of the Whalers quietly wondered whether he'd made the right call in accepting. They're certainly not hurting for money.

However, to say as much would've been folly, and so in spite of their discomfort they kept their counsel and did as were told. They're loyal; it's what they do.

And the thing is, at the end of the day...they're not good men.

Daud had assigned three of them to deal with the princess -- no, the Empress, now, she's a very tiny, very frightened Empress. There was a predetermined place, and a predetermined time. Daud had decided against meeting with the Pendletons himself -- too risky, he'd said, and his men suspect that he also finds them rather distasteful -- but he'd made sure everyone involved knew he'd be watching the exchange. So his men wait, and they wonder if he's hidden in the shadows even now, and all three of them wish, fervently, that Daud had decided to turn the job down. Just this once.

She'd been noisy at first, frighteningly so, with screams as high and shrill and loud as her little lungs would allow. She wailed first for her mother, then the Lord Protector, and then, finally, for _anyone_. She'd screamed, and she'd fought, and she'd _bit_ , and Daud had told them that under no circumstances were they to use sleeping poison. Too difficult to get the dose right: too little, and it wouldn't work; too much, and she'd die.

But even tethered, she managed to do a shocking amount of damage. She had extraordinary aim for such a tiny girl, and she kicked _hard_. After getting hit in the kidneys for the fourth time, one of them finally drew his knife. Daud wasn't going to like it -- if he was watching, that was -- but if she managed to escape that didn't bode well for any of them. He growled, "Stop that."

The girl's eyes went wide when she saw the knife, and she stopped struggling against the tethering that held her in place. In a small voice, she said, "Are you going to kill me?"

"No," said the man with the knife. He tucked it away again. It didn't matter now if it was hidden; the girl knew it was there. He added, "You're to be kept safe."

She glared at him. "You killed my mother."

Technically, Daud was the one who had done that, but the three men guarding the little Empress somehow doubted she cared about the semantics. One of them said, "Yes."

"And Corvo?"

They looked at other, uneasily. The Lord Protector had been an unknown variable, not even supposed to be there in the first place, and Daud had neglected to factor him into the planning. Their own roles were simple -- extraction and nothing more, in and out with the princess ( _the Empress, now_ ) while Daud handled the...other part of the job. As far as they knew, Corvo Attano was just as dead as the woman he was supposed to protect.

And if he was still alive, well...

This is not an Empire that takes kindly to failure. Especially as it concerns the fate of its rulers.

"What about _Corvo_?" Emily said, her voice rising, and the third man snapped, "Hush. Our leader is very thorough. If the Lord Protector is still alive, he certainly isn't coming for you."

And Emily had...looked at him. Dark eyes big and horrified, much too aware and much too _old_ , and in that moment she'd stopped fighting. Stopped struggling. Merely went limp in the grip of the tethering, like a rag doll or a puppet whose strings were cut, and she'd started to cry, quiet and small and helpless.

She hasn't stopped since.

It's been an hour, and the Pendletons are late.

And the thing is, they're not good men. Good men don't do what they do. Good men never would've _considered_ going along with the things they've gone along with today. They're not good men.

But she's a little girl who just watched her mother die, and she won't stop _crying_ , and--

One of them takes off his belt and struggles out of his leather overcoat. Says, defensively, "She's shivering."

Ever since she stopped fighting they'd been able to relax the tethering -- something of a relief, really, because it takes a good deal of concentration and is rather exhausting to boot -- and the girl is miserably huddled in the corner, weeping softly into her knees. The house is a big, stately thing on the edge of Clavering, a condemned plague house that wasn't actually a plague house, chosen by the Pendletons on the grounds that they needed to be in the area to inspect the property anyway. The house is a fine one, but there's no fire to ward off Dunwall's usual damp chill and besides, the curtains are all drawn. A little girl's royal finery, meant for palace gardens and sunny breakfast nooks, is ill-suited for a place like this.

She doesn't notice him approach with the coat, but jerks away the moment it settles around her shoulders.

"Get off!" she yells. "I don't want it. Get _off_."

"You're cold," he says.

"I'd rather be cold," she says. 'I'd rather be cold than take anything from _you_."

Her cheeks are wet and her voice is shaking, and he's not a good man, none of them are good men, but she's a _child_ and...

"I'm sorry," he says quietly. Halting. "For what happened to you. For what we did. I'm sorry."

He half-expects one of the others to jump on him about it, but when he glances in their direction they're very carefully not looking at him and their stances are...uncomfortable. Heads down, shoulders tense. With the masks they've all had to get fairly good at reading each others' body language, and if he's reading them correctly his brothers are just as unsettled about this as he is. To the girl he says, "Please. Please take it."

This time, she lets him drape the coat around her shoulders. She's not outright sobbing anymore, or even sniffling much, but the slow, steady leak of tears down her cheeks is somehow worse. It's...resigned.

"What's going to happen to me?" she says. She looks even tinier now beneath the heavy leather coat.

"There are people coming for you," he says, and from across the room one of the others says, "They aren't going to hurt you."

Implied, in his tone, that they wouldn't hand her over if hurting her was in the plan.

Emily draws the coat tighter around her shoulders, hunches into it. In a small, watery voice she says, "Why are you doing this?"

And he thinks, very seriously, about lying to her. He could tell her that this is all part of some greater plan -- and it is, that part's true, it may not be a plan men of their station have any real knowledge of, but it's still _there_ \-- and that it will mean great things for Dunwall. For the Empire. He could tell her that it's fate. He could tell her it was bad luck. He could tell her any number of pretty little lies that would maybe make her feel better and would maybe make her feel worse, lies and half-truths about politics and machinations, machinations within machinations, the games the nobles play...

But at the end of the day there's only one cold, ugly truth, and against his better judgment he tells her.

"Because," he says. "We were paid to."

"Oh."

"It wasn't--"

"Personal?" And the expression on her face...no child should _ever_ have a look like that in their eyes. "You killed my mother. You killed Corvo. That's pretty personal."

"...I know." He swallows. Thinks about apologizing again, decides against it. "I know."

He can't help but be relieved when she just turns her face into the wall and stops talking after that. The conversation has left him off-kilter, and regret is not an emotion that sits well with any of them.

When the Pendletons finally come for her, he lets her keep the coat.


	13. on elocution

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Anonymous asked: I can’t help but notice that all Whalers we have some interaction with (before they try to kill us) use very elegant language (“Why are you voicing your concern to me?”, “What do you make of it?”, “This is folly”) and are (generally) courteous and good mannered. I don’t believe that would be qualities of a common thug. So. Is it in their background, or are they attending some evening classes?**
> 
> \--
> 
> Also, I wrote this before the Knife of Dunwall DLC came out, so Billie Lurk's characterization may be way off. I haven't finished playing it yet, so...take this with a grain of salt, is all I'm saying.

“The fuck is this shit?”

Rulfio doesn’t look up from the letter he’s writing as the heavy object thumps down on the desk he’s commandeered. He likes this desk; it’s one of the few he’s found that’s mostly in one piece. The inkwell rattles but doesn’t upset, and he waits until he’s finished the line he’s on before he answers.

“It’s a book,” he says. He doesn’t need to look at Reynolds to know that the expression on his face isn’t a friendly one.

“Madame Bindlehoff’s Guide to Grammar, Etiquette, and Elocution,” Reynolds says. “Sittin’ all nice and pretty on my pillow when I got back from scouting out near Bottle Street. You tryin’ to tell me something?”

Rulfio puts down the pen and leans back in the rickety chair. Sure enough, Reynolds is wearing a rather impressive scowl, and a cigarette — as yet unlit, an unprecedented miracle — hangs from the corner of his mouth. His mask is tucked under one arm and his hood’s still up, although whether it’s laziness or concession to the damp chill, Rulfio doesn’t know.

He says, “We have standards to maintain.”

“Standards?” Reynolds stares at him in frank disbelief. “Are you shitting me? We don’t have a roof.”

Rulfio winces. The roof has become a touchy subject of late. The older Whalers all claimed cots with some measure of cover, leaving the younger ones to get rained on in their sleep when the angle of the wind was right. No one’s been particularly happy about it, and lately they’ve gotten rather…vocal.

“Unless you’re talkin’ personal standards,” Reynolds continues. He sets his mask aside and plants his palms on the desk, bending down well into Rulfio’s personal space. “Like maybe I ain’t smart enough to be here. That about the shape of it, boss?”

Summoning the winds has always been one of those hit-or-miss abilities. The younger ones are better at it, weirdly enough, while the older ones are far more adept at tethering and transversal, but for a moment Rulfio seriously considers it on the grounds that it might get Reynolds out of his face. This has not been a particularly good week. In spite of their most careful surveillance, Slackjaw has gone missing and a rather sizable bounty along with him, and Hiram Burrows has been leaving increasingly irritated letters in the dead drop, all but demanding that Daud accept yet another job on his behalf.

After the first such letter, Daud had thrown his audiograph at the wall and sent Thomas out on what ended up being a suicide mission. Since then, Rulfio’s been checking the drop twice as often, and he carefully hides the letters in a trunk he’s relatively sure that neither Daud nor his second know about. He’s thought more than once about just destroying them outright, but that skirts uncomfortably close to mutiny. He tells himself that hiding them is better.

“No, hiding them is stupid,” Rinaldo said when Rulfio finally told him about it. He’d wanted at least one other person to know where they were, just in case he met a bad end — entirely possible given their line of work — and he trusts Rinaldo marginally more than the other senior Whalers.

“It’s only stupid if he finds out,” Rulfio said. Rinaldo gave him a look that said, very clearly, It’s your funeral, my friend.

But all Rinaldo said was, “The longer you wait, the worse it’s going to get,” and the statement has been rolling around Rulfio’s head since. Rulfio knows their leader well enough to know that Daud doesn’t take particularly well to secrets among his subordinates, and if he turns over the letters now then Daud will be furious.

If Daud finds them, however, possibly after more have appeared, it’s far more likely that Rulfio’s body will end up in the river near the plague dumps. Neither option is particularly pleasant, and the last thing he needs right now is one of his men throwing a tantrum.

“It’s not that you’re unintelligent,” Rulfio says. “But let’s take a look at our roster, shall we?” He starts ticking the names off on his fingers, watching as Reynolds’s expression grows more and more thunderous as he lists each one. “Carmichael, Dennett, and I all hail from the Merchant’s Guild. Rinaldo and Richards both crossed Daud’s path at the Academy. Smith has the benefits of an Abbey education. Eli, Faraday, and Connors all come from money.” He smiles tightly. “Shall I go on?”

“Jenkins,” Reynolds growls. “Tyros. Rhys. Fucking Billie Lurk.”

Rulfio’s small, hard smile widens into an outright smirk. “Tyros and Rhys both like to read in their spare time. The classics, I believe, and poetry. Jenkins tends to pick up on the speech patterns of everyone around him, and besides, he developed a fondness for adventure novels after Smith taught him to read.”

Reynolds narrows his eyes. “That still don’t explain Lurk.”

“Didn’t you know?” Rulfio says. He picks up the pen again, absently fiddles with it using his tethering. He knows exactly how petty he’s being, but he’s still unable to conceal his relish when he says, “Billie likes the theater. Before the plague shut down the playhouse, she used to sneak into the shows and perch up in the rafters like an owl. Best seat in the house, she said.”

Reynolds abruptly snatches the pen from midair and snaps it in half. “I’m not gonna read that fucking book.”

It’s been a long week. It’s been a long, trying week, and perhaps it’s the fact that it’s been a long, trying week that prompts Rulfio to say what he says next, which is, “There’s no shame in not being able to read, you know.”

The other man’s stance goes from belligerently neutral to outright hostile in a heartbeat. “The fuck did you just say?”

“Jenkins and Tyros were both illiterate when they joined up,” Rulfio continues, because when it comes to stress relief needling Reynolds is the next best thing to getting drunk. “So were a number of the other men who, sadly, are no longer with us. I’m sure Carmichael would be more than happy to teach you, or maybe—” and there’s suddenly a knife vibrating in the desk in front of him, pinning his half-finished letter to the wood.

“Now that right there is what I like to call a disingenuous fuckin’ assertion,” Reynolds snarls. “I’m not illiterate, you feeble-minded strut noddy.”

Rulfio blinks.

“Try not to look so incredulous,” Reynolds sneers. “You spend most of your younger years on fishing and whaling rigs, even knot-tying starts to get boring after a while. So maybe I decided to pick up a book here and there. Expand my horizons. Learn to be a little more…chrysostomatic, you might say. You wanna guess which books I was usually stuck with?”

He’s not making any move to take back his knife. Rulfio’s never been able to determine exactly how many he carries about his person at any given time, but he’s relatively sure that — hierarchy or not — the second knife would go through his hand if he made a move towards the first.

“You’re going to tell me anyway,” he says, “so you might as well out with it.”

“The Seven Strictures was one,” Reynolds says, and Rulfio rolls his eyes because…no surprise there, the damn book is everywhere. They’re still finding copies stashed away in the most random nooks of their base. They make decent kindling once they dry out, if nothing else. “And the other?” he says.

It’s probably a good thing they wear masks when they work. Their targets aren’t usually good people, but not even they deserve to have the last thing they see before they die be the grin Reynolds is currently wearing.

“The other book,” Reynolds says, leaning so close their noses are almost touching, “was a fucking dictionary.”

…ugh. Of course it was.

He’s opening his mouth to tell Reynolds that he doesn’t care how secretly erudite he is, if he doesn’t get out of his face right the fuck now Rulfio’s going to put his own knife through his eye, but before he can say anything Reynolds just pats his cheek, says, “So I think I’ll just be leavin’ this doorstop here with you, then,” and promptly blinks out.

The book is still on the desk. Reynolds’s knife is not. Nor, as Rulfio realizes not a half second later, is the letter he’d been working on.

Of all the rotten, plague-eaten, whalefucking—

Very calmly, Rulfio stands, picks up the book, and hurls it as hard as he can out the nearest window. Then he goes off in search of Rinaldo. He’s reasonably sure the man’s still stashing a bottle of genuine Old Dunwall whiskey in his footlocker, and he will talk Rinaldo into sharing or die trying. And if that fails, well…

He can always tell Reynolds the book was Rinaldo’s idea.

These are desperate times, and he is definitely a desperate man.


	14. on hounds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A million and one years ago (read: like four months ago) I got an anonymous request for a ficlet about Smith and his hounds in the Dishonored universe.

"I told you this was a bad idea," Reynolds says.

"No you didn’t," Smith says. He blinks over to the vent system and speedily picks his way across until he reaches the end, where he crouches and peers into the alley below. Two of the wolfhounds are nosing the bodies, confused by their stillness and the neat holes Smith’s crossbow punched deep in their chests. The third hound, on the other hand, isn’t confused at all. All four of her massive paws are braced as if she’s poised to attack. Head down, hackles up. Even from this height, Smith can hear her low, throbbing growl.

There’s a  _fwip_  and a rush of air. Reynolds appears on the vent next to him.

"I distinctly recall saying something to that effect," Reynolds says. "Several times."

"You said, ‘This is a fucking stupid idea,’" Smith says. Considers replacing his normal bolts with a sleep dart before deciding against it. He’s not going to need them. "That’s not the same."

Even muffled by the mask, Reynolds sounds incredulous. “You really want to argue semantics? When I say something’s fuckin’ stupid, I feel like the word  _bad_  is implied. Look, I’ll make it easy. This is a bad, ill-informed, awful, terrible, fucking  _stupid_  idea and there’s no way it’s gonna end well, so let’s just get out of here before the damn things start howling and bring everyone in a three-mile radius down on our heads.”

Long speech, for Reynolds. “It’s all right,” Smith says absently. “They don’t make noise unless people run,” and then he blinks down into the alley proper.

Above him, Reynolds mutters a curse. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

The hounds always seem much larger when you’re on the ground with them. A rise in pitch is Smith’s only warning before the big hound lunges. The beasts intended for Abbey use are raised and trained with exquisite care, first by their breeders and later, their handlers, and if he hadn’t worked with them before it’s quite probable the attack would’ve taken him unaware. But he knows exactly what to expect from them, and instead of panicking he simply blinks to the opposite end of the alley and whistles the rapid sequence of notes that means, “stand down.”

The two hounds sniffing around the bodies lift their heads, ears pricking forward. They’re young, still growing into themselves; they won’t attack unless their handlers command it. The big hound, on the other hand, is older and obviously more advanced in her training. She’ll attack unless explicitly directed otherwise, and because her training is so beautifully honed she redirects the moment she hears Smith’s whistle. Skittering over her own feet as she halts, ears back and tail lashing uncertainly. She’s a bunched knot of fur and muscle and teeth. Her every instinct is telling her to go for his throat, but…he knows she won’t.

Smith may look wrong and smell wrong, but she’s too well-trained. She’s no more capable of disobeying his direct command than dancing a Serkonan Two-Step, no matter how much it distresses her.

There’s a whine now underlying the low thrum of her growl. Poor thing.

Smith’s next whistle is one that’s never used outside the walls of the Abbey. It’s a unique sequence, utterly secret, intended for Overseers and Overseers alone. Legend has it the tune was first used by High Overseer Holger to call his own hounds, and that it hasn’t changed in hundreds of years. Smith has no idea if that’s true. What he does know is the moment he whistles it, all three wolfhounds relax as if the mask covering his face was gold instead of leather and rubber. One of the younger hounds sidles up to him, tail tucked under in submission, and bashes into his thigh with a head longer than his forearm.

"Outsider’s fuckin’ eyes," Reynolds says from above. "What did you just _do_?”

Smith clicks his tongue to call the other two hounds over and buries his hands in the ruff of the one leaning against him. Gives it a good, firm scritch. “Their training is perfect,” he says. He pats the younger hound one last time before gently shoving it away and holding out his palm for the eldest to sniff. “But it leaves them vulnerable.”

There is always vulnerability in such things. Holes to exploit, blind spots to use. In order to be effective weapons, the hounds are trained to respond to Overseers without question, which leaves them open to manipulation by people like Smith. People who know the system, who know its rules. It will take some time to erode and reshape their training to the point where they see Overseers as enemies rather than masters, but…

Smith himself is living proof that such things are possible. He scratches one of the hounds behind its ears, smiles at the way its tongue lolls and its tail thumps against the ground. The Abbey can only break so much.

"That’s a real sweet moment you’re having with those rabid monstrosities," Reynolds says from halfway up the building, "but the sooner we get going, the better. At some point someone’s gonna figure out that a patrol went missing, and we don’t want to be around when they do."

"Come down here a moment."

"I like my throat where it is, thanks."

"Reynolds," Smith says. "They won’t attack you. I just want them to get your scent so they’ll recognize you."

It takes several more minutes to cajole Reynolds down, and even then he seems deeply uncertain about the wolfhounds. Stands awkward and stiff while they sniff curiously at his hands and uniform, actually flinches when the smallest and gangliest of the three goes up on its hind legs to nose at the respirator of his mask.

"You need to stay relaxed," Smith says quietly. He’s keeping a careful eye on the hounds’ body language, mindful of their training and sensitivity. "If they sense anxiety, they’ll think there’s something for you to be anxious _about_  and react accordingly.”

"One of these things almost took my leg off when I was a kid," Reynolds says, his voice tight. "I think that’s plenty enough reason to be anxious."

Smith whistles and the hounds trot back over, tails whipping happily. For all his discomfort Reynolds managed the situation well, and now the hounds have his scent. Know him as a friend.

"You should head back," Smith says. "Transversing with the hounds will only disorient them, so I’m going to go via the alleys. We shouldn’t run into much trouble."

It’s something of an understatement. With the exception of weepers, who seem too far gone to know or understand what the presence of wolfhounds implies, most everyone steers clear of the animals. Even the gangs seem loathe to tangle with them, and Smith supposes he can understand — as if their jaws and teeth weren’t bad enough, there are usually Overseers close behind. No one, not even the Hatters or the Dead Eels or the Bottle Street Boys, want to get on the wrong side of the Abbey.

Not when they’re burning heretics again.

Reynolds sighs and unclips his crossbow. “I can’t let you wander around on your own,” he says. Grudging, the way he always sounds when he’s forced to admit he cares about something or someone. “What if you ran into more zealots? Hounds won’t do you a damn bit’a good if someone turns ‘em right back on you.”

"That’s very kind of you," Smith says. "Thank you."

"Ugh," Reynolds grumbles. Takes point, probably so he won’t have to talk to Smith anymore. "You know Daud’s not gonna let you keep ‘em. All this effort for nothing."

And Smith just touches each hound on the back of its neck, getting their attention, and then he clicks his tongue and gestures for them to follow and smiles behind his mask. “We’ll see.”


	15. on the outsider

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Anonymous asked: I am not sure whether you're still writing ficlets about the Whalers based on ask prompts, but in case if you do: The Outsider appears to all of them - either at the same time or individually. How do they react?**
> 
> One of these days, I hope to write about the others. For the time being, here's the story about the Outsider and Tyros.

That night, Tyros perches high in the fore-top, the salt-sticky breeze cool on his skin as the ship cuts through the water. The captain’s been pushing them harder of late, taking them from the familiar waters of the archipelago out towards the unsettling expanse of wide open ocean. If they continue in this direction for too long they will be much closer to Gristol than Tyros would like; their fierce little sloop-of-war is an easy match for the whaling rigs that venture south into the warm Serkonan waters, but their captain is a madman if he thinks they could ever hope to take on a Navy ship. He’s reassured them that he has no intention of doing so, but Tyros isn’t comforted: their captain has also reassured them that this new course is one of divine provenance.

The Outsider has come to him in a dream, he says, and shown him the way. They are surrounded by fortunate omens. The wind at their backs. The luminescent squid that ride in the wake of their ship and set the sea alight once the sun falls below the horizon. The current phase of the moon, full and round and white as a pearl. He claims all of it as evidence that their journey is blessed.

Tyros and the others exchange uneasy glances at this talk. Like most men of the ocean they think favorably upon the Outsider, but this favor is a wary one, tempered with the knowledge that the Outsider is as mercurial as the ocean itself. Not cruel, perhaps, but capricious; he is a creature who takes just as much delight in a storm that shatters ships into matchsticks. If this new course truly is at the Outsider’s behest, Tyros isn’t sure that’s a good thing.

But to say as much would skirt at mutiny, and he has already earned himself punishment for questioning the captain’s decision to haul nets of the bright little squid aboard for their meal.

“Creatures that make their own light have been touched by the Outsider,” he’d said when the captain reprimanded him for standing back instead of assisting the others to bring in the nets. “It’s bad luck to kill them. It’s even worse luck to eat them.”

The captain called him a peasant, insulted his parentage and the traces of the farm still lingering in his accent, and he again demanded that Tyros step up alongside the others in their task.

Tyros refused, and earned himself several nights in the fore-top for his trouble. His hammock, the captain darkly suggested, would be cut into strips and used as bedding for his pet hound.

At least the weather is pleasant enough. The fore-top may not be the most comfortable (or comforting) place to spend the night, but at least it smells better than the hold. Besides, now he doesn’t have to listen to the captain babble about the ship he claims the Outsider has shown him in dreams. Full of mystical cargo, he says. Chests full of gold and coins from strange lands, carved bits of whalebone that whisper in the voices of the dead.

If such a ship did exist, they would be better off leaving it alone. Tyros carefully leans back against the foremast and watches the clouds pass over the fat pearl of a moon. After this afternoon’s fishing trip the black waters below are darker than they were a night ago, but pretty blue lights still flash just below the surface. He wonders, idly, if the lights are a squid’s way of making whalesong.

From the yard just above him a mild voice says, “The squid smell death on your ship. That’s why they follow,” and Tyros is very glad he’d moved up and out of the shrouds because he’s sure the surprise would’ve made him fall to his death. There is a man sitting on the beam where there wasn’t a man before, and Tyros is well-fed, well-slept, and  _sober_. Whatever this man is, he’s not a hallucination.

Tyros isn’t stupid. He doubts his visitor is actually a man at all.

Carefully, he says, “They followed even before we killed many of their number.”

His visitor just airily waves a hand. He makes Tyros uneasy. There is a strange luminescence in him, like the moon, like the eerie flicker beneath the translucent skin of the squid. His eyes are oily and dark, and they observe Tyros with a disconcerting amount of interest.

He says, “Come now, my dear young Serkonan. We both know you’re more clever than that.”

“So it’s true,” Tyros says. “You were the one who sent the captain his dreams.”

The Outsider turns and looks out towards the horizon ahead. “It was his choice to follow them,” he says. His voice is bland and pleasant, as if they are discussing something of no more consequence than whether dried figs are preferable to fresh. “A rather foolish man, your captain. He presumes to think the meeting ahead is meant for his benefit.”

“But it’s not,” Tyros says quietly. “Is it?”

And the Outsider says, simply, “No.”

The breeze ruffles his dark hair and lifts it from his forehead. He is a pale, beautiful, alien thing. He looks little older than Tyros himself, but it’s terribly obvious he is ancient indeed. The stories were right, Tyros thinks, to warn of creatures such as he.

_The squid smell death on the ship…_

“When?” he asks. “This meeting you have engineered by tugging such easily-pulled strings, when will it take place?”

And he doesn’t expect the Outsider to reply — at the very least he expects a reprimand for demanding answers of a being more powerful than he can imagine — but the Outsider just raises his eyebrows and says, “Tomorrow, I expect.”

“You expect?”

“It depends upon factors beyond my sight,” the Outsider says. Tyros’ skin crawls when the Outsider suddenly blinks, tilts his head, and  _looks_  at him.

“You’re far less upset than most men would be in your situation,” he says. “Why is that?”

Tyros gulps. “From what you’re saying, the fact of my death has already been decided. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t upset, but to argue with one such as you would be like throwing stones at the ocean and expecting to change the tides.”

The corner of the Outsider’s mouth twitches.

“You are a simple man,” he says. His mild voice makes it impossible for Tyros to tell if it’s meant as an insult or a compliment. Perhaps it’s neither. “A small, simple man for whom the trajectories of fate hold few surprises. You won’t topple cities. You won’t change the world. Those who would truly mourn your death will either know nothing of it, or will fall alongside you.”

Tyros holds his breath, waiting. The Outsider’s eyes are the color of the ocean on a calm, moonless night, and Tyros gets the distinct impression the creature is looking through him. As if every meaningless, petty thought Tyros has ever had is now on display, as if he’s been flayed open like a gutted fish.

As if there is judgment being passed, of the strangest sort.

“The man who commands the ship your captain dreamt of,” the Outsider says softly. “His name is Daud, and he is an old friend of death.” He pauses. In the moonlight, the expression on his face is clearly a smile. It’s awful, and merciless, and easily one of the most terrifying things Tyros has ever seen. “He doesn’t take prisoners.”

The night sky overhead is wide and clear and now untroubled by the dark blot of clouds. Beneath them, the ship rolls and creaks in time with the ocean, and the black waters below her hull flicker with the soft blue light of silent squidsong. In stories, the Outsider always speaks in roundabout riddles that would drive a man mad, but it’s easy enough to understand what he’s saying now. Tyros chews on his lower lip, and considers the Outsider’s words.

“You say this man Daud doesn’t take prisoners,” he says finally. Tilts his head back against the mast so he can grin weakly at the creature perched above him. “Does he take volunteers?”

The Outsider’s edges blur, but just before he disappears from Tyros’ sight entirely the quality of his small, cruel smile changes. He says, “Why don’t you find out?”

And with that, Tyros is alone again, with nothing for company but the cold stars overhead and the sound of his own pounding heart.

_”Why don’t you find out?”_

In a few hours, the sun will rise. At her heels will be a ship, captained by a man named by the Outsider himself, one who has made death his familiar and who doesn’t take prisoners.

But perhaps…perhaps he will take volunteers.

Tyros settles back against the mast and closes his eyes. Whether tomorrow is the first day of the rest of his life or the last, it’s worth facing on a good night’s sleep.

He is, after all, a simple man. Simple, but  _practical_ , and sometimes…that’s what counts.


	16. on eli

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Anonymous asked you: Please... something... ANYTHING WITH ELI. OHMYGODSPLEASEPLEASEPLEASEANYTHING!**
> 
>  
> 
> Warnings: suicidal ideation, disturbing imagery consistent with the game

Every day, his food supplies dwindle, and every day there’s less and less to be scrounged from the nearby apartments. Eli shoves the tin of whale meat into his rucksack without checking to see if it’s bulging or discolored and tries to ignore the cramping in his belly. It won’t matter if the seam’s gone bad and the meat’s rotten – he’s so hungry he’ll probably eat it anyway, and if he’s lucky maybe it will kill him. Seems like nothing else will.

The whalebone charm sits heavy in his breast pocket, close to his heart. Mira had pressed it into his hands over his protests, said it would protect him from the plague and the rats. He thought it was nothing but superstitious nonsense at the time, but he didn’t have the heart to give it back. Mira _believed_ in things like that, with a fervor that made Eli worry uneasily about the Abbey, and he wasn’t about to throw the gift back in her face when it was so sincerely meant. 

But Mira doesn’t need to worry about the Abbey anymore, or the Overseers. A week after giving Eli the charm she'd disappeared, along with the rest of her family. He'd thought to break into their building to see if they were okay, but when he finally made it to her street the smell of blood and rat piss eventually drove him back.

There were _sounds_. He dreams about those, sometimes.

It’s full of weepers now, that building. Mira’s either among them or the dead and he doesn't know which is worse, and that thought alone is what stays his hand whenever he considers chucking the little carving out into the murky waters below his window. Whatever Mira’s end, Eli gained the trinket only to lose his girl. To toss it now would be unthinkable.

The rats leave him alone since he started carrying it. The plague hasn’t touched him. If he’s going to die, it will have to be through slower means. Starvation’s looking likeliest at the moment, with food poisoning coming up fast second. Neither strikes him as a pleasant way to go, and lately Eli’s been eyeing the broken bottles littering the halls of his building. Their clean, sharp edges.

It wouldn't hurt long, he thinks. Maybe just for a minute.

The apartment he’s ransacking doesn’t turn up much beyond the tin of whale meat, just a dubious jar of pickled herring and a few wizened pears. He adds these to the rucksack, along with a handful of rusty nails he pried out of the boards covering the window. It’s entirely possible there are treasures deeper in the apartment, food or weapons or _something_ , but the roaring of flies is audible even in the main room and the stench of death presses thick at the back of his throat. Eli's weary of corpses.

The next two apartments he breaks into have been picked clean. He almost doesn’t hear the wretched, hacking coughs of the weepers in the third until it’s too late, and he abandons his search after that, his skin slick with cold sweat and his heart banging painfully against his ribs. With Mira’s charm he’s got nothing to fear from the plague itself, but the associated fevers ravage the mind and body both and the weepers aren't exactly _sane_. He'd much rather the clean razor’s edge of a shattered bottle than clawed fingers and broken teeth. 

By the time Eli makes it back to his own building, the howling in his belly is too much to ignore and he digs out one of the pears. The flesh is leathery and sour, makes his eyes water and his jaw hurt, but he eats it down to the core and, after a moment’s hesitation, eats the core too. The awkward weight of the rucksack makes maneuvering over the rooftops more difficult than he’d prefer, more so on days like this when rain and scummy fog make the already slippery tiles treacherous; as he clambers to the third floor window that’s become his new doorway, Eli’s mind wanders to what it usually does during this stretch of the trip. 

Falling. 

Drowning. 

Weepers and hagfish, guardsmen on stilts with their arrows of flame. Looters. Gangs. A hundred and one ugly, violent deaths, the sort a sleek banker’s son might only ever read about in the trashiest of penny dreadfuls. He never used to obsess over death; now, it’s all he thinks about.

There were a lot of bodies when they first closed off the district, flood victims and plague victims, victims of old-fashioned violence. The waters below now churn with well-fed hagfish, and if he fell here he’d be more likely to meet death by their teeth than drowning. It’s a shame, he thinks vaguely. He’s heard drowning’s not so bad once you get over the initial panic of it and--

Lost in dark thoughts of roiling water and jagged teeth, Eli drops the rucksack inside and swings his legs over the window frame, and doesn't notice he’s not alone until it’s already much too late.

The three figures in dark, oiled leathers spin when the bag thunks to the floor. There is a soft, faintly startled sound, like a sharply indrawn breath, and one of the figures disappears only to reappear right next to him. A gloved hand clamps around his throat, cutting off the yell he’d only just drawn in the air to make. He’s yanked forward and sideways, slammed into the wall. His head cracks against the gently rotting wood. Fireworks burst behind his eyes.

“Who are you?” A man’s voice, muffled and strange behind the mask he wears. Eli might've spent the last several months drifting in a numb fog of grief, but the masks are a dead giveaway and he's got a relatively good idea of who these men are. 

The air flickers in his peripheral vision, and the other two figures appear alongside the one holding him against the wall. In the gloom of the apartment, the glass eyes of their masks catch the light in odd ways, almost glowing. Eli can’t remember the last time he felt so scared, or so alive.

“Who are you?” the man demands again. Eli claws at the hand around his throat and feels a faint stirring of panic when his fingers merely slide off the thick leather.

The man on the right jabs the first with his elbow, a bizarrely human gesture when contrasted against the eerie masks and whaler leathers. “You want him to answer anytime soon, Smith, you might wanna release his throat. Pup can’t talk when you’re cuttin’ off his air.”

The man called Smith slightly loosens his grip, and Eli sucks in a deep, grateful breath before he promptly starts coughing.

Smith makes a frustrated noise and releases him altogether, but to Eli’s shock he doesn’t drop immediately to the floor. Instead, the air around him hums and wavers sickly green, and his boots have yet to touch the floorboards.

“Perhaps he is mute,” says the man on the left. Unlike the first two speakers, he doesn’t sound particularly irritated. Even muffled beneath the mask, his voice is softer and faintly accented.

Eli moves to rub his neck and finds he can’t move his arms. He gulps. “I’m not mute.”

The first speaker, Smith, the one he’s come to think of as the most professional and therefore the most dangerous, cocks his head. “What are you doing here?”

“I live here,” Eli croaks. “Fourth floor.” Some stupid, ridiculous sense of daring prompts him to add, “You’re the trespassers here, not me.”

The quiet one makes a choking sound that’s suspiciously close to a snicker, and the second speaker, the one that seems more practical than kind-hearted, wanders over to Eli’s rucksack and nudges it with his boot. Canned goods clink against each other and a few pears roll out onto the floor. The man grunts. “Pup was scavenging from the look of it. Ain’t much here, though.”

“A supply run is a supply run,” Smith says, calm and flat. “Not much is better than nothing.”

Eli blurts, “No, wait!” and cringes back when the man’s shoulders tighten and his body language shifts almost imperceptibly from _annoyed frustration_ to _active threat_.

“No?”

“It’s mine,” Eli says. “I’ll starve if you take it, you can’t just – I spent all day looking and that’s all I was able to find. Please, you can’t--“

“Can’t starve if you’re dead,” says the man by his rucksack in a dry, casual voice, and cold blooms suddenly in Eli’s stomach, crawls up into his chest, his lungs, his throat. “That would solve your problem right there.”

Leather creaks as the third speaker, the quiet one with the accent, shifts as though he’s turning to glare at the second man. “There is no need for outright cruelty, Reynolds. I sincerely doubt a few cans of questionable meat will make much difference to our supplies, and--” 

“Do it,” Eli rasps. 

From the way they all go stiff, this seems to have shocked them. The one named Reynolds straightens, Eli’s bag dangling from his hands. “Kid--“

“I’m not a kid,” Eli snarls. “My family is dead, and my girl is dead, and if you take my supplies I’m dead too, so why not do me a favor and fucking _end it already_?”

In the crashing silence that follows, the metallic _snickt_ of a folding knife snapping open is very, very loud. The other two men flinch; Eli and the one called Smith do not.

The third man catches Smith’s arm. “Wait,” he says, urgent and quiet, a note of caution ringing in his voice, “Smith, I really do not think--“

Smith shakes him off. “Don’t, Tyros.”

Tyros pointedly pulls his hands away. The mask hides his expression, but the frustration is easy enough to read in his body language. 

Eli’s pulse jumps as chilly metal touches his throat, presses into the soft flesh just below his jaw. The blade is long and narrow and wicked, a beautifully designed instrument of death, and even though he’s frozen in a whirling maelstrom of faint green he jerks when Smith applies the barest hint of pressure to the blade. A small, strangled sound rips free from his throat.

“You want to die,” Smith says softly. He doesn’t phrase it as a question. He presses his free hand to Eli’s chest, right over his heart, and Eli has to close his eyes because even under these circumstances it’s still been _such a long time since anyone touched him_. His breath rattles, and he’s not sure if the wetness pooling in the hollow of his throat is sweat or blood.

The realization, when it hits, is staggering:

_He doesn’t want to die like this._

The noise that wrenches out of him is raw and guttural, more animal than human. The blade leaves his throat and now he does drop, crashing to the floor at an awkward angle. He catches himself against the peeling wallpaper to keep from falling. Splinters dig into his palms, and his limbs -- now back under his control -- feel strange and heavy.

Mira's whalebone charm clatters to the boards at his feet.

Tyros crouches to retrieve it. He's almost reverent in the way he turns it over in gloved fingers, inspecting it with startling gentleness before he hands it off to Reynolds. The other man is more businesslike in his assessment but still oddly careful, as though the strange little heresy is somehow special to them. “Huh,” he says after a moment. “It’s real.”

“Of course it’s real,” Eli says numbly. He sounds dull to his own ears, hollow as the gutted remains of the building around them. “It was a gift. Keeps away the rats. Protection from the plague.” He closes his eyes again and turns his face into the wall, suddenly unable to bear any more conversation. “You can keep it.” 

"Reynolds," Smith says. "What do you think?"

Reybolds utters a little blurt of sound, the vocal equivalent of an eye-roll. "What I _think_ ," he says, "is it's not my _job_ to think. Daud will either keep him or he won't."

"If Daud doesn't want him, we have to kill him." Eli's pretty sure that one's Tyros. It's the accent: warm and soft, gently rounded vowels. "If we leave him here, he lives."

Reynolds barks out a small, mean laugh. "You call this living? Face it, Tyros -- whether or not Daud thinks he's worthy, he's better off than if we leave him here."

Eli startles when a hand touches his shoulder. One of the men -- he's not sure which, in the dim light they're difficult to tell apart when they're not speaking -- leans down and presses the charm into his palm, closes his fingers around it, and holds them there. The whalebone is warm from body heat and handling, its worn edges smooth and familiar against his skin. The gloved hand curled around his own is big but surprisingly non-threatening.

"It’s time for you to make a choice." Smith. Unexpected. "You can come with us, or you can stay here. You have to decide now."

"What happens if I go with you?" Eli says.

"Our leader will evaluate you," Tyros says. "Determine whether or not you're worthy of training."

"Training?"

"To become one of us," says Reynolds. He's looped the strap of Eli's bag over his chest and keeps fussing absently with the buckle. "Y’know. An assassin."

An...oh.

Back before the district was shut down, no one talked about the Whalers much. They were stories, boogeymen. Cautionary tales to keep wayward youths in line. The Whalers were the gang the _real_ gangs feared; they possessed powers no man should possess. Outsider-touched heretics, or so the tales went, but no one actually believed they were _real_.

But then the waters came and the district went dark. When the Watch patrolled, they did so on crashing metal stilts, and -- deaf to the cries of the very citizens they were meant to protect -- fired incendiary arrows into afflicted and healthy alike. In the Watch’s absence, the weepers and criminals thrived and swarmed. They teemed like rats picking over a corpse. 

And the Whalers, once bedtime stories people employed to scare children into clean, crime-free living, were suddenly everywhere.

Somehow, it didn't surprise Eli to learn they were _actual assassins_. It certainly made more sense than the explanation his parents had provided when he was eighteen and bored and prone to petty theft. If they were to be believed, the Whalers lurked in the dark waiting for lawbreakers of all stripes, and didn't give a toss whether said lawbreakers were Hatters or rich Rudshore kids.

The memory of his parents, misguided but so well-meaning, makes the hollow place in Eli's chest ache. "And if I don't pass muster," he says. "You kill me?"

Smith appears to be studying him. His fingers are still curled over Eli's. "Yes."

Eli considers this. Finally, he says, "Would you make it fast?"

Smith’s shoulders tighten, as though this was a question he didn’t expect Eli to ask. "Are you saying you want _me_ to do it?" he says. "If Daud decides you're not to be one of us. You want me to be the one to kill you?"

"Yes," Eli says around the lump in his throat. He's not sure what this feeling is, this terrible yawning in his chest where his heart used to be. It's some strange mix of giddy terror and relief, so overwhelming he feels like he's choking, and he doesn't know how to articulate it, how to tell this stranger who held a knife to his throat that dying at his hands would be preferable to every other death he's imagined so far. If he doesn't meet the approval of this man Daud, if he dies because he's found wanting...

It wouldn't be a bad death.

He won't die _alone_.

"All right," Smith says quietly. He moves one hand to the back of Eli's neck, the touch achingly gentle, and squeezes once before letting go. "If Daud wills your death…we'll make sure the task falls to me." 

"'We'?" Reynolds says mildly. “You wanna tell me when exactly I signed on for your mercy death squad there, Smith, ‘cause I don’t exactly recall doing that.”

“Reynolds,” Tyros says, a note of warning in his voice.

“What?” Reynolds snaps. “He wants to do it, that’s fine, but don’t make it _my_ fuckin’ business.”

“ _Reynolds_ ,” Tyros says again.

Reynolds makes an irritated noise. “For fuck’s sake, Tyros, it ain’t like Daud’s actually gonna kill the kid. Ever since all that business with the--“ He seems to catch himself, lets his hands fall from the strap of Eli’s bag as if he’s only just now realized how much he was fiddling with it. “Anyway. If he didn’t off Jenkins, he sure as shit ain’t offing this one.”

“He does appear to know his way around a rooftop,” Tyros says. “I’m sure that will count for something.”

“See? There you go. Problem solved.”

Smith’s not paying attention to either of them. He appears to be focused entirely on Eli, his mask canted forward. He’s a big man, a broadness to him that speaks of muscle rather than fat beneath his dark leathers, dangerous in a way Eli can barely comprehend. _Assassins_. If Eli had asked him to, Smith would’ve opened his throat without a moment’s thought.

The gloved fingers curled over Eli’s are warm and strong. Eli gulps. “ _Promise me_ ,” he says. “Promise me it’ll be you.”

“I promise,” Smith says. Each word distinct and earnest and incredibly final. “I give you my word.”

Eli exhales a breath he feels like he’s been holding for the past several months. “Okay,” he whispers. When he breathes in again, the crushing ache he’s grown accustomed to has all but vanished. “Okay. I’ll…I’m coming with you.”

Smith tightens his fingers once more before finally withdrawing. It’s Tyros who helps Eli to his feet.

“It’s best we leave now, if we’re leaving,” he says. “Our daylight is running low, and—“

“Damn stiltwalkers are out tonight,” Reynolds says. “Time to get moving.”

“Where are we going?” Eli asks. He turns Mira’s charm over in his fingers and finally, for lack of anywhere else to put it, slides it carefully into his pocket. He jumps when a hand encircles his elbow.

“Home,” Smith says. There’s a softness to his voice that wasn’t there before, as though the word itself is something he holds sacred. “We’re going home.”

For the first time in months, the ghost of a smile flickers at the edges of Eli’s lips. “That sounds nice.”

There is a soft startled sound, like a sharply indrawn breath, and the figures vanish one after the next, the fourth at the same time as the third. The only signs of their presence at all are the wet bootprints on the splintered wood floor; in time, those too will disappear.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] what we talk about when we talk about whalers](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6673450) by [Kess](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kess/pseuds/Kess)




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